Slowly But Slowly

Slowly but slowly the scales are falling from people’s eyes and they’re beginning to understand how the terrible and wasteful overinvestment in higher education is stunting the U. S. economy. From the same article in Atlantic as the graphic above:

A new working paper authored by the UC Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein builds on that research, in part by zeroing in on one of those five factors: schools. The idea that school quality would be an important element for intergenerational mobility—essentially a child’s likelihood that they will one day outearn their parents—seems intuitive: Leaders regularly stress that the best way to rise up the income ladder is to go to school, where one can learn the skills they need to succeed in a competitive, global economy. “In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education,” Barack Obama declared in his 2010 State of the Union address. Improving “skills and schools” is a benchmark of Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan’s poverty-fighting agenda.

Indeed, this bipartisan education-and-poverty consensus has guided research and political efforts for decades. Broadly speaking, the idea is that if more kids graduate from high school, and achieve higher scores on standardized tests, then more young people are likely to go to college, and, in turn, land jobs that can secure them spots in the middle class.

Rothstein’s new work complicates this narrative. Using data from several national surveys, Rothstein sought to scrutinize Chetty’s team’s work—looking to further test their hypothesis that the quality of a child’s education has a significant impact on her ability to advance out of the social class into which she was born.

Rothstein, however, found little evidence to support that premise. Instead, he found that differences in local labor markets—for example, how similar industries can vary across different communities—and marriage patterns, such as higher concentrations of single-parent households, seemed to make much more of a difference than school quality. He concludes that factors like higher minimum wages, the presence and strength of labor unions, and clear career pathways within local industries are likely to play more important roles in facilitating a poor child’s ability to rise up the economic ladder when they reach adulthood.*

IMO belief in the role of minimum wages or labor unions is cargo cult thinking. The significance of a strong manufacturing sector and culture isn’t. Here’s the sad truth about higher education:

• Historically, the purposes of higher education were pre-managerial and pre-professional education and networking with others on similar tracks.
• It still is.
• We don’t produce enough managerial or professional jobs for everyone getting college educations to take those jobs.
• Many of those pursuing higher education are not suitable for reasons of ability, temperament, or preference to be managers of professionals.
• Many will end up taking jobs that will never generate incomes high enough to pay off their educational loans.
• Fraternities, sororities, and other similar social organizations in colleges aren’t peripheral to the function of higher education. They’re central to it.
• Consequently, higher education is a waste of time and money for many of those pursuing it.
• Post-graduate education doesn’t make the U. S. more competitive with other countries. It’s a treadmill of which the primary beneficiaries are institutions of higher learning.

There is more at stake in this policy than validating the prejudices and choices of people who’ve been successful pursuing professional degrees. Concentrating the thrust of policy on higher education draws focus from where it should be: primary and secondary education, training in the skilled trades and the requirements of modern manufacturing, and hosts of other things none of which require higher education.

We need to stop subsidizing the choice of pursuing degrees in media and encourage learning how to weld.